September 3, 2006 - Worthwhile religion
22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
3 September 2006
James 1.17-27
Worthwhile religion
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
Something happened last week that reminded me of the days when I rode a motorcycle. I’m on the Healthier Morgan County “executive” [ooh!] committee, and the husband of one of the committee members died of injuries after hitting a deer on his motorcycle Tuesday evening. The calling hours were Friday evening, and was trying to figure out if I could go to Bedford for them. Thinking about my own motorcycle days decided the matter.
Back then, it was an hour’s drive over winding coastal roads to my church in Bolinas from our home in Petaluma. I drove the round trip twice a week, the return drive on Thursday being in the dark, when the deer were out. I drove carefully, watching for them. One day I had the car, which was lucky, because that day a deer did run in front of me, and I hit it. After that, when I was on the motorcycle, I drove more carefully and more slowly. I also drove my car slowly, after that, but all the same, another time I was in a car, I hit another deer. After that I got deer whistles for the bike, and at night I drove slower still.
I also waited by the roadside, if I had the motorcycle and it was dark, until I could get behind a car to follow. Then one night a deer ran onto the road behind the car I was following but in front of me. Somehow that deer sprinted out of my way untouched. Then one evening commute I was driving home from my day job on busy highway 101, and a car changed lanes into me on my motorcycle, knocked me flat on my side and set me spinning for a hundred feet or so. The driver hadn’t seen me. I had no broken bones or internal injuries.
On the way home from the accident, I was thinking about whether or not I had enough life insurance to take care of Marcia and the kids. Then I thought, “Hey, they don’t need insurance money. They need their husband and father.” That’s when I gave up motorcycle riding, considering the circumstances.
Every spring, I get the urge to grab a bike and go riding again. I just love the feeling of freedom and the way you lean into curves, rather than steering. It’s a sort of “one with everything” feeling—Zen-like, I guess—and I miss it. But I have these commitments.
Funny how we suddenly know this sort of thing—the right thing to do, considering the circumstances. James, in his letter to the churches, says that we should expect ourselves to know what to do, and our religion gives us a way to know. What’s interesting is that he does not say you can look it up. People have for centuries thought of the letter of James as the New Testament book that’s all about “works righteousness”—getting into heaven by following the rules—to the point where Martin Luther, who thought faith was all about grace, not works, suggested dropping James from the Bible. I used to think of James that way, but now that I read it with an open mind, I think we’ve not been listening to him very carefully. James does not offer a rule for every situation that requires compliance, but he does explain the importance of figuring out the right thing to do, depending on the situation.
So how shall we know what to do, according to James? Not necessarily by looking it up in an external authority. “Welcome with meekness,” James says, “the implanted word that has the power to save.” There’s something in us that knows.
A new book out by Harvard professor Marc Hauser explains how we all have some idea of right and wrong built in. In Moral Minds, Hauser offers the evidence of a biological predisposition for basic morality. We know there’s something basically wrong with killing each other, and though every culture arrives at its own conditions under which killing is accepted, even expected, the main expectation is that we don’t kill one another. Even in non-human mammals, researchers recognize patterns of compassion both within species and, sometimes, between species. In certain situations, an animal that doesn’t obey the golden rule—do to others as you want them to do to you—an animal that breaks that rule gets shunned by the other animals. Something we’re born with knows the right thing to do.
James goes a little further. To fulfill a divine purpose, James says, “[God] gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of [God’s] creatures.” I’m not sure whether James is referring to the birth we have from our mother’s womb or the birth we have when we enter upon the Christian life. Either way, James clearly sees a Christian vision for making choices and enacting the goodness God intends.
James calls this Christian vision “the perfect law,” which sounds a little intimidating. Personally, when someone says, “Here, follow this law perfectly,” I want to get out of the room as fast as possible. I’ve never done anything perfectly. But that’s misunderstanding James . . . and misunderstanding righteousness. It’s not you and me that James wants to call perfect. It’s the law that is perfect. And he names the law “liberty.”
You have to mine James’s thinking—dig in it and sift it—to work out what Christian liberty means. It clearly doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. In fact, in the very next sentence he’s talking about Christians having to “bridle their tongues.” I’ve never worn a bridle, but I don’t think it would feel like liberty. One thing James must be talking about, then, is the liberty to live free from the captivity we create for ourselves when our tongues wreak their havoc in our lives. Our tongues need to be bridled so that we can be morally and spiritually free.
You know what I mean. Have you ever said something in anger that, after you said it, meant that you thereafter lived under the resentment of someone you injured?
Have you ever made a righteous pronouncement about someone else, only to make it obvious to people who know you that even you don’t live up to the righteous standard you’re pronouncing? Now you’ve bound yourself in the chains of hypocrisy, and the law of liberty punishes you with both self-judgment and the judgment of others.
Have you ever gossiped about someone and then had it dawn on you that the friend who listens to you gossip about others will listen to others gossip about you? Now you live in a prison of increasing mistrust among your very own friends.
The law of liberty, the perfect law, teaches us that the more surely we hone to practices of fairness and grace, the more free we’ll be in our life. There is an implanted word that our Christian faith teaches us—even as other faiths similarly teach their adherents—and it takes practice. Calling it an implanted word suggests that it’s like learning a language. If you’ve ever learned a new language, you know how much practice it takes before it starts to feel implanted. James admits, even if the word is in some sense implanted, that it takes perseverance. We have to be very attentive, and he have to keep working at it to be fluent in it. We seldom get it right the first time.
So it took me two run-ins with deer, one near miss, and one very lucky accident to realize that I had made commitments to people that required me to better protect my life. The day may come where taking more risk would become acceptable again, but to this day it is still right for me to stay off the motorcycle.
But doing right things is more than not doing wrong things, which is all I’ve talked about so far. Sometimes there is a right thing we must not omit to do. So, on Friday, there was a widow in Bedford preparing to receive a long line of friends and family. Friday’s the one weekend night I give myself to kick back or cut loose. Was I going to spend the better part of that evening going to visit her with moral and spiritual support?
I have to confess, I was not thinking about what James could teach me about my decision, and yet I was doing something James would have approved of. I looked in the mirror. I saw myself as someone who had enjoyed the pleasures of my motorcycle. I saw my living face and undamaged head, spared, as I was, from injury and death for doing the same thing that got the widow’s husband killed. Even without considering her need, it in that moment felt in a way ungrateful not to go pay my respect to a fellow traveler whose luck just didn’t hold on his last ride. I owed something to him, I owed something to myself, I owed something to God.
And the widow? She did not expect that someone with whom she’d merely served on a committee would feel obligated. That, though, made it somehow more precious. Who I am, to her, was insignificant, but that someone she knew only a little would take the time in the evening at the end of what for everyone, these days, is a long week, lifted her spirit. She was surprised and moved, and a little light came into her eyes. When James talked about the needs of orphans and widows, circumstances were much more dire for them than for a woman, today. This woman has her own career; there is insurance; the culture grants status to a woman on her own. But it is still true that in deep grief we will, under the best of circumstances, wither into the parched earth of loneliness without a community that surrounds and upholds us in our crisis.
When I looked into the mirror at myself, then, a little longer, I knew that I would not want to look there again if I failed this test of compassion. Thus do I observe what James calls “religion that is pure and undefiled before God.”
Isn’t it odd, then, what we hear people haranguing us about in the papers and public airwaves about purity and defilement? It’s always about some purported abomination, some prurient act or attitude, some presumed transgression of a holiness code, and decidedly, and in particular, it is always about someone else. These people enjoy the anger of their righteousness, but James admonishes them: “Your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” James would have them look long and hard into their mirror, but then they lose their voice. They wield with machismo their inflated wisdom, when they might “welcome with meekness the implanted word.” They may look at themselves in the mirror, James says, but “on going away, they forget what they are like.” That’s the only way they can survive the mirror—by forgetting what they’ve seen.
How do you know what is the right thing to do? God, in mercy, will be your friend, no matter what, and you will receive mercy and grace whether you do the right thing or not, but what will the mirror, which knows not mercy and has no grace to bestow, show you?
What James really teaches us, here, is integrity—not the integrity of one who follows all the rules, but the integrity of one who cultivates the implanted word of truth, so that one becomes “a kind of first fruit” from among all the creatures God has made. We are in integrity when we know what truth we hold most dearly and when we say our truth to one another. Then we are in integrity when what we say aligns us in what we do. Then we are further in integrity when we experience the moral and spiritual liberty of one whose connection to the deepest inward truth informs every outward act. Then we are further in integrity when we lean into the lives of the deeply distressed, like the orphan and the widow—or like the dislocated worker and the homeless, the emotionally disintegrated and the mentally disturbed, the disowned and disdained and disenfranchised—when we lean into their lives with compassion and support.
We are living in a time when organized networks compete in unprecedented ways to restrain and give shape to the moral lives of others. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda want to attack the moral life of the west. The Christian right wants to control the moral life of everyone. Some political theorists are convinced that the free market will produce the most morally acceptable world economy, and others believe that one purpose of government is to hold society to a moral common denominator with regard to the sick, the aged, the poor and other vulnerable classes.
People in power clash with each other on what they think is the moral battleground of human culture. You and I are not their warriors—we are not even their pawns. We are just collateral damage, which is why the deeply sad news in our papers and on TV is not so much tragic as pathetic.
James doesn’t have much to say about all that. He just wants you to know that you have to live with yourself and, ultimately, live with God. If you know where your life and goodness come from, you can become conscious of how goodness works inside you, and if you master the workings of goodness inside you, you can do good in the world. When you and I start taking seriously the word of truth that gave us birth, however distinctly we may see the truth, one from another, we will finally come together and pull the rug out from under the fanatics and ideologs. When you and I—in the clear spiritual vision that at once accounts for and remains unstained by the absurdities of our postmodern world—when we finally begin to live with an inward alignment to our life-giving truth, all the apparently powerful of the world will recede in their impotence against the many of us who know the truth of our life and have decided to live by it.
I know that in some places our bible presents the image of us standing before a throne of judgment at the end of days, and this image is meant to help us decide what to do in our life, today. If we are afraid of what will happen to us in the judgment for making the wrong decision, it clarifies our thinking. That’s one way of looking at things. James offers us another way. He does not offer the frightening vision of the last judgment. He even sets aside the disconcerting reflection in a merciless mirror. James invites us to look into the perfect law, the law of liberty.
What would that be like?
What if you believed in the law of liberty? What if you were to realize you could make your choices in complete freedom? What if you did not worry about what people would do if you did and said exactly what you believed in? What if you freed yourself from fearing what might happen if you trusted the truth of the implanted word that gave birth to you once and gives you life still? Is there any power that can deny you this liberty? Do you want it?
Freedom. Amen.
3 September 2006
James 1.17-27
Worthwhile religion
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
Something happened last week that reminded me of the days when I rode a motorcycle. I’m on the Healthier Morgan County “executive” [ooh!] committee, and the husband of one of the committee members died of injuries after hitting a deer on his motorcycle Tuesday evening. The calling hours were Friday evening, and was trying to figure out if I could go to Bedford for them. Thinking about my own motorcycle days decided the matter.
Back then, it was an hour’s drive over winding coastal roads to my church in Bolinas from our home in Petaluma. I drove the round trip twice a week, the return drive on Thursday being in the dark, when the deer were out. I drove carefully, watching for them. One day I had the car, which was lucky, because that day a deer did run in front of me, and I hit it. After that, when I was on the motorcycle, I drove more carefully and more slowly. I also drove my car slowly, after that, but all the same, another time I was in a car, I hit another deer. After that I got deer whistles for the bike, and at night I drove slower still.
I also waited by the roadside, if I had the motorcycle and it was dark, until I could get behind a car to follow. Then one night a deer ran onto the road behind the car I was following but in front of me. Somehow that deer sprinted out of my way untouched. Then one evening commute I was driving home from my day job on busy highway 101, and a car changed lanes into me on my motorcycle, knocked me flat on my side and set me spinning for a hundred feet or so. The driver hadn’t seen me. I had no broken bones or internal injuries.
On the way home from the accident, I was thinking about whether or not I had enough life insurance to take care of Marcia and the kids. Then I thought, “Hey, they don’t need insurance money. They need their husband and father.” That’s when I gave up motorcycle riding, considering the circumstances.
Every spring, I get the urge to grab a bike and go riding again. I just love the feeling of freedom and the way you lean into curves, rather than steering. It’s a sort of “one with everything” feeling—Zen-like, I guess—and I miss it. But I have these commitments.
Funny how we suddenly know this sort of thing—the right thing to do, considering the circumstances. James, in his letter to the churches, says that we should expect ourselves to know what to do, and our religion gives us a way to know. What’s interesting is that he does not say you can look it up. People have for centuries thought of the letter of James as the New Testament book that’s all about “works righteousness”—getting into heaven by following the rules—to the point where Martin Luther, who thought faith was all about grace, not works, suggested dropping James from the Bible. I used to think of James that way, but now that I read it with an open mind, I think we’ve not been listening to him very carefully. James does not offer a rule for every situation that requires compliance, but he does explain the importance of figuring out the right thing to do, depending on the situation.
So how shall we know what to do, according to James? Not necessarily by looking it up in an external authority. “Welcome with meekness,” James says, “the implanted word that has the power to save.” There’s something in us that knows.
A new book out by Harvard professor Marc Hauser explains how we all have some idea of right and wrong built in. In Moral Minds, Hauser offers the evidence of a biological predisposition for basic morality. We know there’s something basically wrong with killing each other, and though every culture arrives at its own conditions under which killing is accepted, even expected, the main expectation is that we don’t kill one another. Even in non-human mammals, researchers recognize patterns of compassion both within species and, sometimes, between species. In certain situations, an animal that doesn’t obey the golden rule—do to others as you want them to do to you—an animal that breaks that rule gets shunned by the other animals. Something we’re born with knows the right thing to do.
James goes a little further. To fulfill a divine purpose, James says, “[God] gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of [God’s] creatures.” I’m not sure whether James is referring to the birth we have from our mother’s womb or the birth we have when we enter upon the Christian life. Either way, James clearly sees a Christian vision for making choices and enacting the goodness God intends.
James calls this Christian vision “the perfect law,” which sounds a little intimidating. Personally, when someone says, “Here, follow this law perfectly,” I want to get out of the room as fast as possible. I’ve never done anything perfectly. But that’s misunderstanding James . . . and misunderstanding righteousness. It’s not you and me that James wants to call perfect. It’s the law that is perfect. And he names the law “liberty.”
You have to mine James’s thinking—dig in it and sift it—to work out what Christian liberty means. It clearly doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. In fact, in the very next sentence he’s talking about Christians having to “bridle their tongues.” I’ve never worn a bridle, but I don’t think it would feel like liberty. One thing James must be talking about, then, is the liberty to live free from the captivity we create for ourselves when our tongues wreak their havoc in our lives. Our tongues need to be bridled so that we can be morally and spiritually free.
You know what I mean. Have you ever said something in anger that, after you said it, meant that you thereafter lived under the resentment of someone you injured?
Have you ever made a righteous pronouncement about someone else, only to make it obvious to people who know you that even you don’t live up to the righteous standard you’re pronouncing? Now you’ve bound yourself in the chains of hypocrisy, and the law of liberty punishes you with both self-judgment and the judgment of others.
Have you ever gossiped about someone and then had it dawn on you that the friend who listens to you gossip about others will listen to others gossip about you? Now you live in a prison of increasing mistrust among your very own friends.
The law of liberty, the perfect law, teaches us that the more surely we hone to practices of fairness and grace, the more free we’ll be in our life. There is an implanted word that our Christian faith teaches us—even as other faiths similarly teach their adherents—and it takes practice. Calling it an implanted word suggests that it’s like learning a language. If you’ve ever learned a new language, you know how much practice it takes before it starts to feel implanted. James admits, even if the word is in some sense implanted, that it takes perseverance. We have to be very attentive, and he have to keep working at it to be fluent in it. We seldom get it right the first time.
So it took me two run-ins with deer, one near miss, and one very lucky accident to realize that I had made commitments to people that required me to better protect my life. The day may come where taking more risk would become acceptable again, but to this day it is still right for me to stay off the motorcycle.
But doing right things is more than not doing wrong things, which is all I’ve talked about so far. Sometimes there is a right thing we must not omit to do. So, on Friday, there was a widow in Bedford preparing to receive a long line of friends and family. Friday’s the one weekend night I give myself to kick back or cut loose. Was I going to spend the better part of that evening going to visit her with moral and spiritual support?
I have to confess, I was not thinking about what James could teach me about my decision, and yet I was doing something James would have approved of. I looked in the mirror. I saw myself as someone who had enjoyed the pleasures of my motorcycle. I saw my living face and undamaged head, spared, as I was, from injury and death for doing the same thing that got the widow’s husband killed. Even without considering her need, it in that moment felt in a way ungrateful not to go pay my respect to a fellow traveler whose luck just didn’t hold on his last ride. I owed something to him, I owed something to myself, I owed something to God.
And the widow? She did not expect that someone with whom she’d merely served on a committee would feel obligated. That, though, made it somehow more precious. Who I am, to her, was insignificant, but that someone she knew only a little would take the time in the evening at the end of what for everyone, these days, is a long week, lifted her spirit. She was surprised and moved, and a little light came into her eyes. When James talked about the needs of orphans and widows, circumstances were much more dire for them than for a woman, today. This woman has her own career; there is insurance; the culture grants status to a woman on her own. But it is still true that in deep grief we will, under the best of circumstances, wither into the parched earth of loneliness without a community that surrounds and upholds us in our crisis.
When I looked into the mirror at myself, then, a little longer, I knew that I would not want to look there again if I failed this test of compassion. Thus do I observe what James calls “religion that is pure and undefiled before God.”
Isn’t it odd, then, what we hear people haranguing us about in the papers and public airwaves about purity and defilement? It’s always about some purported abomination, some prurient act or attitude, some presumed transgression of a holiness code, and decidedly, and in particular, it is always about someone else. These people enjoy the anger of their righteousness, but James admonishes them: “Your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” James would have them look long and hard into their mirror, but then they lose their voice. They wield with machismo their inflated wisdom, when they might “welcome with meekness the implanted word.” They may look at themselves in the mirror, James says, but “on going away, they forget what they are like.” That’s the only way they can survive the mirror—by forgetting what they’ve seen.
How do you know what is the right thing to do? God, in mercy, will be your friend, no matter what, and you will receive mercy and grace whether you do the right thing or not, but what will the mirror, which knows not mercy and has no grace to bestow, show you?
What James really teaches us, here, is integrity—not the integrity of one who follows all the rules, but the integrity of one who cultivates the implanted word of truth, so that one becomes “a kind of first fruit” from among all the creatures God has made. We are in integrity when we know what truth we hold most dearly and when we say our truth to one another. Then we are in integrity when what we say aligns us in what we do. Then we are further in integrity when we experience the moral and spiritual liberty of one whose connection to the deepest inward truth informs every outward act. Then we are further in integrity when we lean into the lives of the deeply distressed, like the orphan and the widow—or like the dislocated worker and the homeless, the emotionally disintegrated and the mentally disturbed, the disowned and disdained and disenfranchised—when we lean into their lives with compassion and support.
We are living in a time when organized networks compete in unprecedented ways to restrain and give shape to the moral lives of others. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda want to attack the moral life of the west. The Christian right wants to control the moral life of everyone. Some political theorists are convinced that the free market will produce the most morally acceptable world economy, and others believe that one purpose of government is to hold society to a moral common denominator with regard to the sick, the aged, the poor and other vulnerable classes.
People in power clash with each other on what they think is the moral battleground of human culture. You and I are not their warriors—we are not even their pawns. We are just collateral damage, which is why the deeply sad news in our papers and on TV is not so much tragic as pathetic.
James doesn’t have much to say about all that. He just wants you to know that you have to live with yourself and, ultimately, live with God. If you know where your life and goodness come from, you can become conscious of how goodness works inside you, and if you master the workings of goodness inside you, you can do good in the world. When you and I start taking seriously the word of truth that gave us birth, however distinctly we may see the truth, one from another, we will finally come together and pull the rug out from under the fanatics and ideologs. When you and I—in the clear spiritual vision that at once accounts for and remains unstained by the absurdities of our postmodern world—when we finally begin to live with an inward alignment to our life-giving truth, all the apparently powerful of the world will recede in their impotence against the many of us who know the truth of our life and have decided to live by it.
I know that in some places our bible presents the image of us standing before a throne of judgment at the end of days, and this image is meant to help us decide what to do in our life, today. If we are afraid of what will happen to us in the judgment for making the wrong decision, it clarifies our thinking. That’s one way of looking at things. James offers us another way. He does not offer the frightening vision of the last judgment. He even sets aside the disconcerting reflection in a merciless mirror. James invites us to look into the perfect law, the law of liberty.
What would that be like?
What if you believed in the law of liberty? What if you were to realize you could make your choices in complete freedom? What if you did not worry about what people would do if you did and said exactly what you believed in? What if you freed yourself from fearing what might happen if you trusted the truth of the implanted word that gave birth to you once and gives you life still? Is there any power that can deny you this liberty? Do you want it?
Freedom. Amen.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
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